Fresh Scales
by Breezewhiskers
Summary: On the run after taking Vicki Vale hostage, Copperhead comes to realize that perhaps there are more important things than the next big assassination.


According to herself, Vicki Vale isn't much of a daredevil. Well, daredevil is a loaded word anyway, it makes you sound like you relish the thrill of danger. Miss Vale is undoubtedly one of the most courageous people in Gotham next to the Bat himself. Then again, Batman doesn't have a registered address nor does anyone know who he actually is, unless you're one of those who think that he actually is a bat-demon thing or a failed military experiment. Vicki Vale, being a investigative reporter, was as clean and courageous as possible in a town like Gotham, seeing as how she wasn't on anyone's payroll, nor was she sleepin' with the fishes. She did her utmost to reveal corruption and present the news as it was. She is, by all accounts, an upstanding citizen.

That doesn't mean she's a daredevil though. Indeed, coming to the Sions Steel Mill shortly after she had heard of a Batman sighting on her technically illegal police radio, was a very risky move that she knew, could very well mean the end of her career, or her life. She decided the possible reward outweighed the potential risk if she stayed cool and didn't take any frivolous chances.

A frivolous chance like opening a locked container from which banging sounds were being emitted?

"Hell, might be him." Vale quietly muttered to herself as she very slowly undid the latch that separated her from whatever was held within. It being Batman was very unlikely, but Vale already knew that. Creeping through the mill had yielded literal piles of unconscious masked thugs, automatic weapons and stacks upon stacks of dubious cash. There were even a few goons suspended from the interior gargoyles found near the ceiling of the mill. Undoubtedly the Bat's handiwork. Wasn't exactly Black Mask's style to leave people alive, or swinging in the begrudging air of this fateful December night.

The snow was seeping in everywhere, and Vale's jacket wasn't doing nearly enough keeping her safe from this blackened Christmas eve, covered in deathly snowfall where the screaming of the wind was only interrupted by distant gunshots. Instead of holiday cheer bestowed upon Gotham, there was only a savage hunt for the one good thing that has happened to Gotham since anyone could remember. In place of presents underneath the tree, there were only smoking shell casings, delivered not by Santa, but some other thing of the night that slipped in through a crack in your home. Instead of holiday specials on TV, there were news reports covering murders and police corruption. In that silent, frozen and dilapidated steel mill, Vicki saw a vague glimpse of the moon through one of the broken sections of the wall, through the curtain of frenzied snow and realized that on this Christmas eve, she was truly on her own. No family, no friends, not even a co-worker that she could trust. She readied her stun gun and very deliberately opened the steel door to face the void that filled the steel box.

It wasn't the Batman.

Nor a forgotten thug.

It was the thing that sneaks through a crack in your home in the dead of night.

Vicki didn't have time to pull the trigger on her stun gun before she found herself on the dead, frigid floor of ice and metal. Her head snapped upwards to face whatever it was. It found her first. She could feel what felt like two sharpened icicles on her jawline, two more on the back of her neck. A slow, caressing wave filled her nerves with the essence of cold, she shivered, but she did not dare look at what it was.

The soft sound of naked feet upon the unforgiving floor accompanied the twisting of her head towards whatever it was. Vale could see the face of a woman. Not any woman. Was it really a woman? Her eyes looked like they had been ripped out and neatly replaced with those of a reptile. They seemingly glowed an alluring yellow light, surrounded by a straight slash of paint, stolen from the blackened Christmas eve outside. Her hair matched Vale's, blonde albeit much shorter, seemingly boyish. Her purring voice matched the cocky ruby smile that she had donned.

"Thanks for the rescue, _chica_." The reptile purred as she continued stroking the nape of Vicki's neck.

Vale feared that if she spoke, the metal talons she was sporting on her index and middle fingers would puncture her windpipe like a sharpened knife in a fruitcake.

They were interrupted by the rushing of boots and cocking of rifles. A squad of cops burst through the double doors further up the stairs. Of course, she had about heard of this place on the police radio, of course the police were going to show up. With dizzying haste, Vicki was pulled into a stranglehold and yanked behind an assortment of abandoned milling equipment. The cops hadn't spotted her or the reptile-woman that was preventing her from yelling out.

"Make a sound, and you are going to die in the _worst_ way you could possibly imagine." Her captor hissed into her ear with hot breath intertwined with some fluid whilst tightening her leathery, sticky grip, making sure Vicki felt the metal talons against her throat. Vale was then pulled out silently through the maze of abandoned milling equipment, through a door and into the embrace of the snowstorm outside.

Her captor unlocked a dingy buggy waiting in one of the many dead ends in the mills' cold crevices. Relinquishing her grip, she threw Vale into the passenger seat, hitting her head hard in the process.

The last thing Vicki Vale remembered was riding through the howling night, headlights illuminating the snowfall in front, and the gleaming smirk of two yellow orbs floating in the cold night air.


End file.
